Cleft vs On‑Device AI
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Cleft
This app is designed for verbal thinkers to capture their thoughts out loud, without typing. It offers real-time transcription, offline functionality, and smart organization. Ideal for those who prefer speaking their ideas, it provides a frictionless way to record and manage notes.
- Live transcription
- Offline-first functionality
- One-tap voice capture
- Smart organization
- Markdown export
- Apple Watch support
- On-device transcription
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You're a verbal thinker. Cleft captures thoughts before they vanish. The way you think. Out loud. On device, even offline. Featured in Fast Company's "25 Best New Apps." Capture on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or CarPlay. Wherever a thought lands. "You've built one of the BEST apps for ADHD people." - Jenner, Entrepreneur KEY FEATURES • Spotlight Search - Find any note instantly from anywhere • Fast Transcription - Keeps up with how fast you talk • One-Tap Capture - Voice to text in seconds • Pick Up Anytime - Add to yesterday's thought. Or any note, whenever the next one lands • Siri & Shortcuts - Search notes, get summaries, export by voice • Apple Watch - Record notes from your wrist • CarPlay - Capture hands-free while driving • Recording at a Glance - Dynamic Island, Lock Screen • Keyboard Shortcuts - Fast navigation without leaving the keyboard • Widgets - Pin a thought, resume your last, or capture fresh from your home screen • Offline-First - Works without internet, syncs when connected • Smart Organization - Capture first. Organize never. • Markdown Export - Edit and format your notes • Privacy by Design - On-device transcription, encrypted storage "When I looked at what was written, it was like 'My God, somebody got me here.'" - 73-year-old farrier, first time user BUILT FOR HOW YOU THINK Accessibility isn't a feature here. It's the foundation. Cleft was made by people with ADHD, Autism, and Dysgraphia, for people who think the same way. Capture ideas without losing your flow. No system to manage. Rambles welcome. "Fits my brain like a glove." - Rafa, Founder CAPTURE ANYTHING Meeting notes • Creative ideas • Article drafts • To-do lists • Project docs • Daily journals • Quick thoughts CLEFT PLUS ($6.99/mo or $39.99/yr — annual works out to $3.33/mo) • 30-minute recordings • Customize Cleft - tell it how you want notes shaped • Notion auto-send + Obsidian & Apple Notes integrations • Zapier & Shortcuts automation • Family Sharing on annual - share Plus with up to 6 people "$39 a year for this is ridiculously low." - Legal tech advisor Subscriptions auto-renew until canceled. Manage in App Store settings. AS FEATURED IN Fast Company • The Verge • Lifehacker • GeekWire • TechCrunch • Snazzy Labs Try Cleft Free. Change Log: https://cleftnotes.com/changelog/ Terms: https://cleftnotes.com/terms Privacy: https://cleftnotes.com/privacy
On‑Device AI
Transform your device into a private AI assistant for meetings and complex tasks. Features include speaker diarization, live transcription, and specialized subagents for research, analysis, and writing. Control your AI via messaging apps, with options for 100% offline processing or cloud connectivity.
- Speaker Diarization for meeting transcripts
- Real-time live transcription
- Natural AI speech generation
- Deploy specialized AI subagents
- AI-powered web browser automation
- Control AI via messaging apps
- 100% offline processing option
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On-Device AI puts chat, listening, transcription, notes, and research in one private app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. Your data stays on your device. Download a model once and keep working on a plane, on the subway, or without a signal. Chats, documents, recordings, and notes stay on your device. Online providers and web features are optional and work only after you enable them. ONE APP, YOUR WAY Open every workspace from a customizable Menu. Keep favorites under Pinned and everything else close by under Available. AI CHAT Chat with local or cloud models. • Run local models from families such as Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Mistral, or connect a cloud provider account or your own model server • Browse, download, and manage models that fit your device, including ones for text, vision, reasoning, and tools • Import GGUF models from Hugging Face; the app checks the chat template and sets it up before downloading • Queue follow-up questions while a reply runs, and switch chats without losing it • Drop in documents, images, and scanned PDFs; approve private on-device OCR only when a PDF needs it • Fork any conversation and compare several models on the same prompt • Let the model use tools for calculations, web requests, documents, Calendar, and Reminders, and review proposed changes before they apply • Create reusable Agent Profiles, then add AI Skills, MCP servers, and tools from one clearer Agent Workflows setup • Keep facts you repeat often in Global Memory LISTEN LIBRARY AND RSS FEEDS Read less, listen more. • Turn PDFs, Markdown, plain text, web articles, and scanned books into a listening queue • Scan photographed pages, correct the OCR the app runs on device, and keep each page with its spoken text • Follow sites through RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds, then send articles to Up Next • Choose Apple voices or local neural voices, follow along in the reader, and set a sleep timer VOICE NOTE, VOICE TYPING, AND TEXT TO SPEECH Speak instead of typing, and listen instead of reading. • Record and transcribe meetings, lectures, interviews, and quick ideas • Dictate with Voice Typing on Mac or the voice keyboard on iPhone and iPad • Transcribe with Apple Speech, Whisper, Parakeet, Nemotron, Qwen3-ASR, MOSS, and other engines • Turn text, or text captured from a photo, into audio with Apple voices, Kokoro, Supertonic, VoxCPM2, IndexTTS2, and other engines • Export transcripts as text, subtitles, or Markdown AI SEARCH AND AI BROWSER Research with a second pair of hands. • Search the web in a conversation and let the model read the results for you • Browse with tabs, profiles, history, and downloads, then ask your model to read, assist, or act on the page • Hand a task to the browser agent, watch each step, and take over whenever you want KNOWLEDGE AND TEXT NOTE Give your AI your own material to work from. • Add PDFs, text, Markdown, code, images, and website content to a private searchable library • Write and edit Markdown notes in the app • Import AI chats, voice notes, Text to Speech items, and AI Search results • Tune retrieval and index edited content again APP HELP Ask how a feature or setting works. App Help answers from a guide that ships inside the app, keeps help out of your saved chats, and points to the right settings. MADE FOR APPLE DEVICES • Native layouts adapt from focused navigation on iPhone to category sidebars on larger screens • Widgets for Listen, Voice Note, Text Note, and Quick Actions • Siri, Apple Shortcuts, App Intents, the Mac menu bar, and keyboard shortcuts you can customize • Apple hardware acceleration for supported local models • Store models internally, on an external drive, or on a shared volume, with separate tools for cleanup and recovery • Interface in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Traditional Chinese EULA: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Cleft at 4.7 against On‑Device AI's 4.4. Cleft also leads on review sentiment (80% vs 64%). On price, ratings volume, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Cleft sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $6.99 per month and On‑Device AI sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Cleft holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.4. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 70 and 163 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 80% of Cleft's written reviews are positive against 64% of On‑Device AI's.
Cleft ships an update monthly, On‑Device AI fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on October 30, 2026 and November 8, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Cleft | On‑Device AI |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.7 (70 ratings) — better | 4.4 (163 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 80.4% of reviews — better | 63.6% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 70 | 163 — better |
| Update frequency | Monthly | Fortnightly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 270 MB | 1.8 GB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Cleft AI | Zijie Deng |
Customer experience
Cleft
On‑Device AI
User reviews
Cleft
From 70 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 Excellent transcription quality
- 👍 Intuitive and easy to use
- 💡 Helpful summarization and formatting
- 🚀 Seamless cross-device experience
- 👍 Responsive and helpful support team
Room to improve
- 🐛 Unreliable recording and syncing issues
- 🐛 Glitchy and unusable after recent update
- 🐛 Inconsistent performance and frequent errors
On‑Device AI
From 163 App Store ratingsWhat we love
- 🚀 Game-changing AI assistant
- 🔍 Powerful search functionality
- 👍 Customizable and versatile
- 🌐 Seamless multi-device experience
- 💡 Innovative character-based interactions
Room to improve
- 🐛 Crashes on larger models
- 🔋 Heating issues on some devices
- 🔍 Slow and unreliable web search
- 💻 Buggy on macOS
Bugs and requests
Cleft
Reported bugs
4 issues- Recording stops working after initial use
- Inability to append to existing notes
- Manual sync never works as expected
- Lack of support for non-English languages
Requested features
6 requests- Increase maximum recording time
- Improve editing and toggling between modes
- Add ability to retry processing failed summaries
- Allow custom storage locations for notes and audio
- Enhance integration with Obsidian and other tools
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Expand Shortcuts and automation capabilities
On‑Device AI
Reported bugs
3 issues- Crashes on startup
- Model selection issues
- Inability to copy generated text
Requested features
9 requests- Automated multi-character conversations
- Character set saving and syncing
- Streamlined search integration
- UI optimization for icons
- Remote endpoint support for multi-agents
Show 4 moreShow fewer
- HomeKit integration
- Improved documentation
- Enlarged agent input window
- Per-agent model assignment
In-app purchases
Cleft
- Monthly Plus Plan$6.991 Month
- Annual Plus Plan$39.991 Year
On‑Device AI
- Pro Member Subscription$3.991 Month
- Pro Member Subscription$34.991 Year
- Lifetime Pro Member$49.99
- Lifetime Pro Member$99.99









